By Garett Hunt
The Comparative Literature Program at Purdue University is multi-disciplinary in its nature, structurally encompassing collaboration between the Department of English and the School of Language and Cultures. In practice, research in comparative literature draws from a broad range of methodological approaches from the social sciences and humanities. In his graduate studies analyzing modern literary myths through rhetoric analysis, Mr. Lott’s research has drawn from an array cross-disciplinary qualitative approaches to guide his reading of literary text. He explains that literature represents “equipment for the living” from which an author’s position within their society can be read. Words and text is the product of expressions of reoccurring social situations which individuals are confronted with. These situations are products of larger social structures. By exploring rhetoric expressed within metaphors, analogies, and proverbs these structures can be evaluated through the author’s position navigating and negotiating within them.
In order to ask questions of the larger structures and properly frame the author’s responses to these those, researchers need to understand the experience of the social situation themselves. What makes mythological characters, such as vampires and werewolves, particularly pertinent to today’s society? What experiences do they represent? What messages are authors conveying to their readers through these characters about their society? Lott explains that he has studied and used a wide range of qualitative methods in order to understand the social contexts of modern myths. This has included the use of survey questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with the primary consumption audiences and consumer organization, or “fandoms”. Others in his field have used other methods, such as the content analysis of coded historic texts, philosophical analysis, and dramatic analysis.
Lott attributes participant observation as a highly informative way to gather large volumes of contextual data. People are not always, and perhaps often, not fully consciously aware of social structures in which they operate. As a result, asking people to identify their engagements with these structures in direct approaches, such as questionnaires or interviews, may not provide the full framing of how individuals are actually engaging and responding to literary rhetoric. Participant observation within spaces where text is discussed or engaged with actively can reveal cognitive, ideological, and cultural themes that might not otherwise be obvious.
Lott does not describe his participant observation as ethnography in the classic anthropological sense of a long-term deep hang out, but suggests that collaboration between comparative literature and anthropology could be mutually beneficial. Anthropology can provide a rich contextual description of experiences within different identified social structures. A rhetorical analysis of comparative literature in turn can assist as a means for studying individual agency and identity within these structures. The analysis of text provides a methodological process for theorizing the internalized way in which experiences are interpreted, symbolical coded, and reproduced. While Lott has taken classes in qualitative anthropology, he is not aware of any current actively pursued collaborative projects between the programs. He suggests that such partnerships might provide exciting new directions for future research.
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